


Reunion Tour

by jedishampoo



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, M/M, usukustwiceperyear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-17 23:59:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18109154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedishampoo/pseuds/jedishampoo
Summary: After their band’s messy breakup, Alfred and Arthur turn burglar to recover their work, and rediscover their partnership at the same time.





	Reunion Tour

It’s been kind of a crappy day.  I’m sitting in the front room – what Deirdre called the “parlor”— half-watching the nothing that’s on TV.  Through the white curtains, which are blowing ‘cause I’ve left the window open, I can see the dying light, the fog rolling on in like it does here in London, and hear the jibjab of people in the street as they head out for dinner, head out to the pub on the corner.  Their voices fade in and out with the mist.  
  
When this court thing is all over and I’m free, I’ll probably just move back home to the good, old, US of A.  Houston’s kinda lameoid, but at least I have family there, it’s warm, and I’ve got some money now.  I’ll get a nicer place than the one I left.  I’ll get another band, too.  I’m a pretty decent drummer these days.  
  
The phone on the table next to me rings.  I answer, and it’s _Arthur_ , of all people.  Bad news, but my insides do a tiny little dance anyway at the sound of his voice.  
  
“Are we allowed to talk?” I say when he says _Oi_.  
  
“I don’t give a bloody fuck about all that.”  
  
“Oh,” I say, because I don’t really know.  My lawyer didn’t tell me.  But what does Arthur want with me?  He’s made it pretty clear—  
  
“I need your assistance with something,” he says, in that prissy British way he does.  
  
“Yeah?  What?”  
  
“I.  I need you to help me to recover the masters.”  
  
“The _masters_?  Which ones?”  
  
“You know which ones.”  
  
And weirdly, I do.  From _Arkham Bound:_ the whole reason we’re in this mess.  My insides stop fluttering and clench with sudden panic.  
  
“What do they need recovering from?  Did someone steal ‘em?”  
  
“Not yet,” Arthur says, and I think, _Oh_.  
  
“You’re drunk,” I say.  
  
“Not.  I’m still clean.”  
  
“Liar.”  
  
“I’m so clean I fucking shine.   I just—” and here his voice goes all proper again.  “I merely don’t want Top City to have them right now.  Those are ours, represent our strife and our sweat, and I want to reclaim leverage from the vultures profiting off our … squabble.”  
  
_Squabble_ , he calls it.  Today alone was more hellacious than that!  But yeah, our label – ex-label – clearly doesn’t care about us or our strife or our sweat.  And tears, but I don’t tell Arthur that.  ‘Cause he’s talking to me, and also, I’m already getting kinda excited about doing something I shouldn’t.  With Arthur, like in the old days.  
  
Still.  “You’ll totally get arrested.”  
  
“Not if we’re quick and careful.”  
  
“We?”  I wanna add, _I’m neutral, remember?_   I don’t.  “You have a plan?”  
  
Arthur hears something in my voice.  He goes all low and sly.  “Yes, and I need you for it.”   
  
Talk about shiny; I feel a little burny on the inside.  But I don’t say that, either.  
  
“Oh, do ya?” I lean back on my soft easy chair, stretch out.  “This oughta be good.”  
  
“Please just say yes, Alfred.”  He’s being nice.  He knows I like the sound of my own name.  The jerk.   
  
“Oh, I dunno.”   
  
“Will— will you do it for–”  
  
He pauses.  If he says, “for me,” or “for that time we had,” then hell yeah, I’ll do it.  Because getting arrested would be worth hearing Arthur admit to anything resembling feelings.  But after a little more stuttering, he spits out something else.  Quelle shock.  
  
“—for the times I supported you.  Like when the suits wanted us to find another drummer…”  
  
Asshole!  He just had to bring that up, didn’t he?  When we first got signed, and Top City was going on about how the band needs a skilled rhythm section and the Yank is perhaps not quite up to snuff _pip pip pip cheerio_ , Arthur says _sod off, we’re a group_ , and then practiced with me, just the two of us on the side, for long, gnarly hours, and he bitched at me the whole time, but I knew he cared.    
  
Still, he’s an asshole!  “Fuck you, man.”  
  
“That’s fair.  I apologize for bringing that up,” he says, again with the low, sexy voice.  
  
_Dangit, dangit, dangit_ , he always knows how to make me do stuff I don’t wanna do, always did, and I’m totally gonna go along with the jape.  Plus he’s right.  It’s our music, and we made it.  “Yeah, I’ll do it.  You’re driving, though.  If you’re really not drunk.”  
  
“Shine.  See you in fifteen.  Ta,” he says, and hangs up.   
  
“You’re welcome,” I say aloud to the dead line.  I sound bitter.  And that so sucks!  That’s, like, not me, never has been, you know?  
  
A little petty larceny is just the thing to put the money back in my beat.  The snap back in my hats.  Even if I have to do it with Arthur – or maybe because I’m doing it with Arthur?  Aw, heck, who cares?  I get up to get dressed.  
  
*****  
  
When Arthur shows up at my door I’m ready to go, got on my black Cavariccis and my black Docs and a black turtleneck. Do I need black gloves?  It’s been kind of a warm fall, even with the fog.  
  
Arthur snorts when he sees me.  “Fuck me, you look like a cat burglar.”  
  
“And you look like you’re ready to go onstage,” I shoot back, with a laugh.  And he does.  He’s got on his black leather pants and a netty shirt-thing over a _Closer_ tee, and dark eyeliner like whoa.  “You look like a blond Peter Murphy, circa 1983.”  
  
“Oh, stow it, wanker,” he gripes, but he flushes all pink and cute.  Truthfully, he looks like _Arthur_ circa 1983, and doesn’t that bring back good memories to go with my peppy mood?  
  
“Aww, I’m just joanin’ on ya,” I say and grin.  “In court today you were all stiff and suity-lookin’.”  
  
“And I have to be, don’t I?  What about you?  You with your university and your bits and bytes.  You were all _aw shucks, I’m just an east Texas boy, don’t know nothin’, dude, just wanna make good music, yannow?_ ”  
  
“Hah!”  He does a pretty good impression of me.  Drawl and all.  “You know I’m the neutral witness in this.”  
  
“Yes, you’ve said.”  He sounds bitter now.  But personally, I think it feels good to be talking about it.  Just ragging on each other, like we used to.     
  
“Yeah?  Well, newsflash, dude: being neutral sucks.  You haven’t talked to me until now.  And I haven’t talked to Yowz and Wolf at all, y’know?”  
  
“Neither have I, except through my solicitor.”  
  
“Those twerps,” I say.  I sigh as I lock the door and follow Arthur to his car.  They were my friends until just recently.  Our own little Culture Club of punk rock.   
  
Yow’s parents are from China, but he’s a born Manc, a City fan and everything.  The music press calls him the “Oriental Johnny Marr,” which he sometimes thinks is funny, and which sometimes super pisses him off.  He’s a kickass guitarist and songwriter for sure, and deserves the thirty percent he signed up for.  But more?  Sheesh.  
  
And Wolf — he was the frontman, yeah.  But he just sang the words Arthur wrote, to the tunes Yow and Arthur composed.  I guess he thinks that since he scowled so awesomely when he sang and drew all the girls backstage with his Slavic hunkiness, that his contract needs renegotiating.  
  
Thus all the court-and-lawyer bullshit, with Yow and Wolf fighting Arthur against his share of publishing and royalties.  Once upon a time in ’82, ‘83, we used to just kind of share everything.  Flats, food, booze, dreams.  There was that righteous night where Arthur and I had – well, anyway, it was because there weren’t any royalties, and we didn’t even know what the hell “publishing” was.  (It’s the copyright to the songs we wrote, in case anyone is wondering, and it’s kind of worth a lot of dough now ‘cause we sold a lot of records.)  
  
Me, I don’t care.  We made money I never expected and had fun doing it.  At least, up until we finished recording _Arkham Bound_ a few months ago and Arthur tried to find us a label that would treat us better.  Everything fell apart after that.  Top City freaked, and Yow and Wolf freaked because Arthur’d gotten clean and was “taking over” (like he hadn’t been our de facto leader for, like, ever, even drunk).  So we broke up before _Arkham_ was even released.  
  
Arthur starts the car.  It’s smaller and sportier than the one he had back in the day.  It seats two.  He sighs his own sigh.  “It’s just … _Arkham_ ’s my favorite thing we ever did.  We were all at our best.”  
  
“Even me,” I say.  It’s not a question.  
  
Arthur looks at me, and maybe he’s all flushed again, but I can’t totally tell ‘cause it’s dark.  “Yes, you in particular.  Your recomposition of _Quiet Plains_ was brilliant.  And all the work you did, recording your own sessions and mine on the Yamaha for playback and reverb—it was a revelation.”  
  
“Thanks, man!”  I knuckle him in the bicep.  His bare arm is surprisingly warm.  “Too bad we’ll never do it live.”  
  
“Hmm,” Arthur says, and looks back out at the road.  He never liked touring the way I did.  That’s part of why he drank so much.  “The record’s a fitting swansong, at the least.”  
  
“Better than that.  You’ve heard swans singing, right?  It’s like _hisssss-killl the humannnn—hissss_ —”  
  
Arthur knuckles me back, to stop my elbows from flapping.  “Don’t be an ass,” he says, but he’s smiling a little, I can tell.  
  
I want to make him smile more.  I want to—what I want is for him to pull the car over and for us to make out and hopefully even screw, and for him to look at me, really look at me, and tell me that he cares about what happened between us that one time.  
  
But I ain’t likely to get that, because he’s not drunk, and our band isn’t together anymore.  It’s been a year for breakups.  
  
So I just laugh back at him.  “Anyway, what’s your awesome plan?”  
  
“Well, we go to Raspberry Street …”  
  
The studio.  “Yeah, and?”  
  
“I break in, find the closet with the masters, and nick _Arkham Bound_.”  
  
“Dude.  Your plan is to break in?”  
  
The eyebrow closest to me draws down at my tone.  “Yes?”  
  
“How?  Do you pick locks?  Did you even bring a crowbar?  A baseball bat?”  
  
I get a snort and the whale-eye for that.  “You’re such a Yank, sometimes.”  
  
“Proud Texas boy, born and bred,” I drawl.  
  
“Quite.”  Arthur rolls down the window and turns his face into the breeze, like it’s suddenly hot in the car or something.   
  
I just watch him, watch his spiky hair riffling in the breeze.  Seriously, if I have to have a thing for dudes sometimes, I wonder why Arthur is, like, the pinnacle of all dudes ever for me?  Though I guess I shouldn’t wonder too hard.  He’s cute.  He’s a great kisser.  And he’s really super-smart.  Like, kind of an awe-inspiringly good lyricist.  I would never tell him that, not in a million years.  
  
“Quite,” he says again at last, and rolls up the window.  “No bats.  No picks.  Remember that lounge upstairs, with the big window we’d open so we could have a cig or five?”  
  
“Yup.”  
  
“Well, it’s never locked, is it?”  
  
“Don’t they alarm the place at night?”  
  
“Not bloody likely.  Skint bastards.”  
  
True, that Top City are cheap as hell.  Like the first time we toured in the States, and the label didn’t even pay to insure the van that was carrying our gear.  Of course what happened was that our stuff was stolen in New York, outside the Iroquios.  The guys were lucky I spoke the local language, you know?  The cops got half of it back for us, though it was once we were already playing in Cali on rented gear.  
  
That was once upon a time in 1983.  Five years sometimes seems like forever, and sometimes like it happened three or four eye-blinks ago.  Time is weird like that.   
  
“Did you bring a ladder?”  I pretend to look around his tiny little car.  
  
“That’s where you come in,” Arthur replies.  
  
*****  
  
We get there and cruise to the alleyway behind Raspberry Street Recording Studios, and I see where I come in.  I’m to boost Arthur up to the window and then hang loose on the street, being the sly lookout, until he has the tape reels.  
  
Good thing I’m a tall and sexy Texas boy.  That window is like ten feet off the ground!  It’s dark behind the glass, even though there are lights on in the front.  Someone’s recording, and I wonder who.  One of our ex-label mates?  Whoever it is aren’t smokers, I guess.  
  
“We could just walk in,” I suggest.  “Maybe it’ll be buds of ours, who won’t care that we’re there.”  
  
“No,” Arthur says, and laces his fingers together in front of my face to show me what he wants.  I’m a dutiful ladder: I make a stirrup for Arthur’s boot so he can climb me.  Not how I’d prefer it, but we’re having fun, so whatever.   
  
He’s heavier than he looks: wiry, all muscle.  I hadn’t forgotten that.  I get a view of his black leather thighs, and then all I can see are his combat boots on either side of my face, ‘cause he’s standing on my shoulders, stretching up.  Then he’s on his tippy-toes futzing with the window and I gotta hold his ankles steady and brace myself on the damp brick wall.  
  
“Are you just about done?” I huff.  
  
“I’ve got it.  The bastard,” Arthur crows, and then remembers to whisper.  “One more boostie, ta.”  
  
I extend even more.  He pulls himself offa me and onto something, and I crane my head to see his black leather calves shimmying through the window. And here’s where I hang out nonchalant in the alley, trying to look like a local— nope, not up to no monkey business here, folks, I swear.  I’d light a smoke to look more legit, but I quit a year ago to show solidarity with Arthur when he was getting sober.  
  
I have to duck behind corners a couple of times when I hear people go in and out of the front.  It’s Sulky who are recording, and I actually am friends with those gals, but I can’t go say _hi_ , duh. Because I’m a total accomplice to burglary.  
  
And it’s a blast.  Even feeling all twitchy and fidgety, saying _come on, come on, come on_ under my breath like a drumbeat spit out of a Yamaha, waiting for Arthur to get back or for someone to shout out an alarm.  Hopefully it’ll be Arthur first, and then we can figure out how to get his ass down.  
  
How we get his ass down when he finally reappears is this: he drops the tapes to me, and I catch them and stuff them under my shirt and into the top of my jeans.  Then I streeeetch up to catch the chunky bottoms of Arthur’s Docs so he can let himself down to hang from the window sill, his wiry arms straining, and then I try to position his soles on my shoulders.  But he slips, and I end up catching him with a hand in his crotch and his elbow in my face.  We tumble to the street, laughing like idjits.  
  
I check the blocky tapes under my shirt and they look okay.  So we bump knuckles and snicker over that until I hear Sylvie Frost’s voice ‘round front, going, _what the fuck’s that noise?_  
  
We shush right the hell up and by the time someone rounds the corner Arthur’s got me shoved against the wall, kissing me, his hands in my hair hiding my face. Just a coupla moony gits swapping spit out here, nothin’ to see, darlin’.  It’s so freaking awesome I want to cry.  
  
“Oi!  Clear out,” Sylvie hollers.  
  
“Strip your feet of lead, my friend,” Arthur whispers, and we crack up again and book it to the car.  When we get there I’m a little breathless and Arthur’s eyes are shiny and his cheeks are flushed.  From the exercise of running while laughing our asses off, of course.  
  
“Dude.  That’s the oldest trick in the cat-burglar book,” I say.  
  
“Worked, dinnit?” Arthur ripostes.   
  
Arthur’s half-smiling and looks like he wants to kiss me again.  So this time I just do it first, up against the car.  
  
“Brilliant, brilliant,” Arthur murmurs against my mouth.  “D’ye wanna … take this back to my place?”  
  
“Hell, yeah,” I whisper back, ‘cause I know he doesn’t mean the masters.  I’m so danged easy, I swear.  
  
Then it’s a case of driving and climbing the steps and getting in the door and into his bed, all made steamy and blurry by Arthur’s mouth and my grubby paws all over Arthur’s limbs.  I read the story in his tattoos, all of ‘em from the earliest home-dug runes to the colorful Age-of-Sail artwork that he actually paid for in New York and Amsterdam and everywhere.   
  
And the stuff he says in the throes of passion!   Like _God, I’ve missed you, you beautiful, mad, Texas bastard_.  Unnnngh, it’s why I signed up with him in the first place and couldn’t ever let him go.  
  
When we’re done, when we’re all sweaty and aching and my breathing returns to something approaching normal, I get up to figure out where my glasses fell.  Now would be a good time to get contacts, right?  But I like my glasses.  They make me look smarter.  
  
Not that I’m stupid.  I put my computer degree to good use on _Arkham Bound_ , that’s for sure.  
  
I find my specs on the floor and stand up to discover that Arthur has been ogling my bare ass with a dorky grin on his face.  When he sees me he swivels away, suddenly awkward.  
  
“Er,” he mumbles, then clears his throat.  “So I prolly should’ve asked earlier.  But what about Deidre?”  
  
I roll my eyes, though he can’t see, and sit back on the edge of the bed.  “We broke up.  A couple months ago when you weren’t talking to me.”  
  
“Ah.  Thought I might’ve heard that.”  
  
Uh huh.  He still won’t look at me.  So I poke him in the stomach, right in Admiral Nelson’s stoic face.  And yeah, I know who Admiral Nelson is.  
  
“Looks like I’m officially-unofficially not-neutral anymore,” I say, and that and the poke gets his green, eyeliner-y eyes focused back on me.  
  
“I can be professional,” he replies, turning up his nose in that posh British way he has.  
  
“So is that what you want?”  
  
I’m sneering a little, maybe, but I think I can be forgiven that after the brush-off he’s given me the past few months.  
  
His eyes widen, then shut, and he’s silent for a few moments, his skillful, bass-callused fingers fiddling with the bedsheets.  “No,” he finally says, when he can look at me again.   
  
Really look at me.  I appreciate it, and smile to let him know.  “Good.”  
  
He grins like sudden sunshine, blasting away the momentary fog.  “Here I thought you all hated me.”  
  
Of course he did.  Because he would never ask.   
  
The dumbass. Still, I’m warmed by that sun, gotta admit, and my insides do their squishy little Arthur-dance that they do.  That they always did, even when he was drunk, or giving bollocks to the press, or throwing my drumsticks across our itty-bitty, cramped, and dark practice room.  Because I knew he cared.  _Knew_ it.  
  
“Nah,” I say, and shrug, and we’re all good for the moment, and that’s enough for now.  I twiddle my smart-Texas-boy glasses at him.  “You know you can’t keep the tapes.  I know you won’t destroy ‘em,”  
  
He sighs.  “No.  I’ll have to give them up legally.  Eventually.  But it will be on _my_ terms.  Greedy, vulture-fucking-bastards.”  
  
“Tell you what.  I’ll take one of them for myself.  They’re mine, too!  We’ll be complicit in our leverage.”   
  
Arthur’s grin curls up even higher, into an evil, satisfied, and slightly wobbly thing.  “Then, Alfred, it’ll be on _our_ terms.”   
  
“Us. We.  Our.  Don’t forget it again, you jerk.”  
  
He pulls me close, and I get down with some more of being utterly not-neutral.  Us, we, will be together.  Probably in _our_ own cozy jail cell, but danged if I care in that moment.  


**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Written for the usukustwiceperyear tumblr community's "Recovery is Possible" event - check it out on their tumblr!
> 
> This is another rock band AU from me, but set in the 1980s. This one was inspired by events depicted in Johnny Marr's autobiography, about the end of the Smiths and his desire to get ahold of the masters for "Strangeways Here We Come."


End file.
